The big PartyGaming product switch

Is the Group founded on Poker, looking at the Online Casino product as the future?

The results from last year reported by the PartyGaming group highlighted a huge shift away from its original offering online poker to the online casino product. The business, which was built on Poker and a massive amount of US marketing is now openly focussing all of its efforts on the sector which is currently delivering higher volumes of profit – the online casino.

They have announced a new three stage strategy that aims to target pure play casino players, rather than trying to recruit poker players and then convert them through to the casino favourites of blackjack, roulette and slots or Online Pokies.

The rationale behind this is that pure play players stay with Party Casino twice as long as players who gamble on other online gaming sites like bingo and poker.

Jim Ryan from Party said: "Here is why this is important. Historically, we have acquired all of our casino players from our poker database. That's been great, because our cost of acquisitions hasn't been particularly high, but it hasn't been particularly good for our poker liquidity in a challenged competitive environment where we need to grow that liquidity.

"What we have now started to do is go and acquire pure-play casino players. The magic of a pure-play casino player is that their lifetime value is twice that of a poker consumer who moves over to casino. So our casino offering will grow in 2010 and beyond."

The strategy involves adding more branded casino content and offering players 'life-changing' jackpots. Ryan said: "We will have 50 new games this year. The content will be exciting… branded content.

"The second aspect of the strategy is focused on having life-changing events. It's a jackpot-based strategy. Today we have the largest reset value in our Melon Madness Jackpot [which] starts at US$1.5m. Nobody else can match that in the sector. So we will continue to bring those life-changing events to the consumer."